his fate hardly, but Dicky had taunted him and then had suggested that a
man whose conscience was clear and convictions good would carry a high
head in trouble. Dicky challenged him to prove his libels by probing the
business to the bottom, like a true scientist. All the way from Abdallah
Dicky talked to him so, and at last the only answer Mustapha Kali would
make was, "Malaish no matter!"

Mustapha Kali pricked up his ears with hope as he saw the sullen crowds
from Kalamoun gathering on the shore to watch his deportation to the
Cholera Hospital; and, as he stepped from the khiassa, he called out
loudly:

"They are all dogs and sons of dogs, and dogs were their grandsires. No
good is in a dog the offspring of a dog. Whenever these dogs scratch the
ground the dust of poison is in the air, and we die."

"You are impolite, Mustapha Kali," said Dicky coolly, and offered him a
cigarette.

The next three days were the darkest in Dicky Donovan's career. On the
first day there came word that Norman, overwrought, had shot himself. On
the next, Mustapha Kali in a fit of anger threw a native policeman into
the river, and when his head appeared struck it with a barge-pole, and
the man sank to rise no more. The three remaining policemen, two of whom
were Soudanese, and true to Dicky, bound him and shut him up in a hut.
When that evening Fielding refused to play, Dicky knew that Norman's fate
had taken hold of him, and that he must watch his friend every minute--
that awful vigilance which kills the watcher in the end. Dicky said to
himself more than once that day: